Towards a Web digital archive ontological unification

Abstract

The Web is a universal space where a huge amount of information is daily published. Digital archives (DA) constitute a valuable documentary domain to be propagated through the Web. But the virtual integration of Web heterogeneous data sources is a difficult task nowadays. This paper deals with the semantic integration of many specific DA ontologies. Beforehand, we have proposed a virtual and dynamic Web integrated architecture, based on mediator and wrapper layers. This paper is focused on a unified DA ontological proposal allocated at the mediator layer. Coming from the ISAD(G) and ISAAR(CPF) International Archival standards, two specific archival ontologies: ISAD-0 and ISAAR-0 are introduced. Besides, we have built the integrated parliamentary management system, SIAPI (successfully running at the Asamblea of Madrid since 1999) that contains a powerful parliamentary archive system. From it, we have built the SIAP-0 specific parliamentary archive ontology. Above all these ontologies, a global ontological kernel (GOK) is here introduced. The GOK, as a unifying umbrella, provides the attachment of many pre-existing specific DA ontologies. In the future, this GOK will make possible that the user query will be firstly pre-processed against to a personalized ontology, inferred from the GOK and tailored to each Web user preference's profile.